All Features articles – Page 358
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Features
Slow take-up for new approach
Two years after Norway introduced its long-awaited legislation to encourage the take up of defined contribution (DC) occupational pension plans, pension providers, asset managers and consultants are still waiting for the market to take off. The enabling legislation was supposed to light the fuse of DC plans by making them ...
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Features
Asset to be avoided?
Despite a widespread flight to cash within the international investment community in periods over the last two years, by and large, pension funds have remained loyal to equities markets. With the FTSE All-World index down 38% since November 2000, many investors have seen cash as a safe haven. But while ...
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Features
Coping with fixed liabilities and volatile assets
Pension funds, and particularly defined benefit (DB) ones, are basically a bag of liabilities. These obligations have to be matched by both current assets and the future income stream. In the past 50 years, pension funds have benefited successively from high returns on equities, bonds, and equities again. Since September ...
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Features
Siemens tracks assets globally
Siemens employs around 450,000 people worldwide and in the US is the biggest foreign employer with some 80,000 employees. The group’s pensions liabilities, including Germany, amount to some €18.5bn. At the end of September 2002, to coincide with the end of the group’s financial year, the Siemens group treasury department ...
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Features
Successful overhaul of fund's structure garners Award
What the judges said: “Since 2001 PBU has made a giant leap forward which now allows it to be ambitious and search for best practice in all aspects of running a pension fund. Here is a winner.” When the news broke at Denmark’s fledgling PBU pension fund that it had ...
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Features
Award demonstrates that fund has 'got it right'
Though the judges awarded the IPE investment strategy prize for Denmark to Industriens Pension because of its clever outsourcing of asset management, the deliberate balance between internal and external managers and its use of new asset classes, Jan Oestergaard, the head of investments at the Copenhagen based fund, feels that ...
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Features
Award provides opportunity to present unique concept
Metallrente, the recently established sector-wide supplementary pensions provider for the German metal workers and related industries, believes winning the IPE country award for Germany is a sound acknowledgement that it came up with the perfect concept and structure within the country’s new pensions landscape. “Winning the IPE award gives us ...
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Features
Award provides opportunity to spread message to others
What the judges said: “Pens Plan is a pension fund which deserves very high scores both for Investment Strategy and Fund Structure & Administration.” Winning an IPE award does not come as a surprise to PensPlan, which last year seized Italy’s investment strategy award, but for 2002, the Italian scheme ...
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Features
Award underpins role of providing quality retirement
One of the commendations that PGGM received from the judges was on its move to provide a defined contribution product PGGM Extra Pension(PEP) alongside its main defined benefit scheme. “Greater individualisation and flexibility are not in conflict with solidarity.” The move was seen as an innovative step. At the fund ...
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Features
Award provides a 'peer group benchmark' for the fund
What the judges said: “Clearly structured and informative website which also answers most FAQs.” One of the key benefits of winning an IPE Award for the Zurich-based Beamtenversicherungskasse, the Civil Servants Insurance Fund (CSIF), is the international and domestic exposure it brings. “In Switzerland the employer decides whether an independent ...
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Features
Wider exposure will come as result of awards wins
Belgacom is a very well-organised fund, the judges comment. This is not too surprising a view, since the fund to its delight has won both investment strategy and fund administration awards in this year’s roll of honour. Now the Brussel-based pension fund is keen to find out what set it ...
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Features
Getting the money away
Italy’s part-privatised state electricity utility, the Ente Nazionale Per l’Energia Elettrica (Enel), operates two pension schemes – one for managers and the other for its employees. The arrangement has its advantages. The smaller white collar scheme has provided a ‘test bed’ for key changes to the larger blue collar scheme ...
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Features
Bank of Ireland's 'mission statement'
The €2.85bn Bank of Ireland Staff Pensions Fund (BSPF) is the main fund for the Bank of Ireland Group, covering 75% of the employees of the Bank of Ireland Group. Its 13,500 members, of which just under 10,000 are active members, include employees in the Republic of Ireland and the ...
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Features
Focus on IT developments has been key part of strategy
AP7 has won an IPE Country Award for fund structure and administration in Sweden. The AP7 national fund is the default fund of the Swedish PPM system set up two years ago. Since then, the developments within the PPM system and the AP7 fund itself have been closely followed by ...
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Features
Being a second-time winner underpins the success of strategy
Fonditel continues to be one of Spain’s strongest pension gestoras, winning for the second year, an IPE Award for the investment strategy of one of its pension funds – Fonditel B. This covers pension provision for employees of 25 companies affiliated to the Telefónica group. Fonditel B has assets under ...
